


Land of Milk and Honey

by Koeji



Category: Tales of Xillia 2
Genre: Bad End spoilers, Implied Sexual Content, Incest, M/M, Sibling Incest, kresnikcest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-02
Updated: 2015-03-02
Packaged: 2018-03-15 22:30:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3464444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Koeji/pseuds/Koeji
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set after Julius Ending.  The Kresniks cope with the time they have left before the end of the world.  Not with a bang, but a whimper.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Land of Milk and Honey

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ailia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ailia/gifts).



> One last sorrowful gift fic to the lovely Alex before she leaves us! Best of luck, I love you, and I'm sorry I always make these sad things for you. Thanks for the triple incest goggles.
> 
> This was written mostly to the sounds of the "Her" soundtrack, which I recommend if you're into mood music with your fics. Specifically (and fittingly) the tracks "Milk & Honey" and, for the ending, "Some Other Place." I kind of let my imagination run wild as far as the nature of the miasma goes, but artistic liberties, right?!

> "In this last of meeting places  
>  We grope together  
>  And avoid speech  
>  Gathered on this beach of the tumid river"  
>  \--T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men  
> 

Julius doesn’t wear the glove anymore. Somehow its presence is more painful and telling than the sight of the hand itself. And after a while, it becomes hard to tell that the glove is gone, because what is left does not look like skin; it turns to the smoothest darkness, like the surface of a frozen lake at night, free of creases or divisions. As if his hand had been plunged into a mold, emerged without seams. Even the distinction between finger and fingernail becomes difficult to discern. As the blackness travels upward, where it has not been for long, traces of flesh reemerge, but that hand is no longer flesh. It has become something else, and Julius cannot help but think that perhaps humans were never supposed to delay their transformations for as long as he has. Like how the rest of the body begins to fall apart as one ages. He will not be rewarded for living this long.

There’s no point to the glove anymore. There is nothing left to hide between them and they don’t like the indication that there ever was. Its abandonment makes Julius anxious for a while; he’s not used to the sensations, numbed as they are, and he occasionally still reaches to pull it on in the morning. Each time he feels its absence he looks back to see where he could have dropped it. A fair amount of coaxing on Ludger’s part is needed before Julius can bring himself to touch him with it, or even things he knows Ludger will touch, as if the transformation is some fatal disease. Julius has already seen it play out too many times in his dreams, dreams he has passed the nights with for many years. Dreams which nearly convinced him to conceal both hands, just in case – to never have the chance to touch Ludger again. Just in case.

But after a time, Julius comes to enjoy the happiness of the exposure. He likes running his fingers through Ludger’s hair – it’s fine and impossibly soft, featherlike – whenever and however he likes. He likes helping Ludger cook, even if he’s only in charge of washing the vegetables. He likes playing the piano they find in the old abandoned house they’re hiding out in for now – it’s old and half-broken and awfully out of tune, but Julius fixes it up the best he can and summons up what little playing ability he’s retained after nearly two decades of neglect. He cannot for the life of him remember any of the inane tunes he played as a child under Bisley’s tutelage, but he has always had somewhat of an ear for music and manages to piece together a few notes rolling around in his head. The hymn is the first song he teaches to Ludger, but they both agree it doesn’t sound quite right coming from an instrument. It was always meant to be sung.

Julius likes that Ludger can hold his hand when it starts to hurt; sometimes Julius feels pathetic for it, but the look on Ludger’s face when Julius brushes him away is somehow even worse than his expression when he’s holding him. Julius is happy to have him there in the nights now, when the pain jolts him from sleep; the process used to rest with him, but by now it has taken on a will of its own. When Julius screams into the darkness, Ludger is silent, just threads his fingers between Julius’s and rests his forehead in the crook of Julius’s neck. It feels like an apology. But Julius won’t have any apologies, not so long as he can fall back into bed and pull Ludger’s warm body against his and wait for the morning.

It is only at times like that that Ludger cries. They never talk about what happened in Marksburg, but Julius is not fool enough to think Ludger has forgotten it. Julius has had years of practice of putting such things out of his mind – practice Ludger has never had, thank goodness, Julius sometimes thinks, he has always been so sensitive, so wonderfully sensitive – and his memory of that scene still haunts him at times. But Julius has no words of comfort for him then. He knows Ludger wouldn’t want them, knows Ludger doesn’t regret a thing – how could he? The Kresnik brothers had dropped out of the regret game long ago, these were casualties of war, a few more worlds destroyed – then their world. But this is fine. This is fine. And Julius doesn’t hate Ludger for the choice he made, and he knows Ludger does his best not to hate himself either. They’ve distanced themselves from it – viewed those bodies littering Marksburg’s port with the feeling of a funeral. Assuming Julius wasn’t going to die for it – and he wasn’t going to die for it – they were bound to perish eventually with the rest of them. It’s something that can’t be helped.

Julius only mourns for the lost time – the decades of his life wasted in the grip of Spirius to prolong an inevitability. The whole affair had been a long shot anyway, the Waymarker business, Julius unable to even manifest a complete Chromatus. But he’d sunk years into it all the same, years spent away from Ludger in order to ensure his future which would now never come. Part of Julius says he gave Ludger everything he had to give – and other people have said the same, for years – but there was something more. There was always something more. With some effort, the queer moratorium they live in now could have been their lifetime. I couldn’t possibly have known things would end up like this, Julius knows. But he can’t accept it.

They try to make up for it now, in what time they have left; each time they have to move, they settle into their new place like it’s forever. Vacant homes are getting more and more common as families relocate to other parts of the new world. They’re rarely furnished at all, but sometimes there’s at least a bed, and if it’s far away enough from the city they don’t have to worry about being chased out as squatters. Those isolated cabins in the forests are their favorite, old family vacation homes already equipped for the coming travel season. From there they can keep tabs on the town rumors, and by the time the local authorities realize the Kresniks might be in their midst, they’re already gone; woodsy cabins are usually low on their investigative agenda. 

When they’re feeling especially brave, they like to leave the windows open for a while and enjoy the wafts of pine filtering in from the trees. They do that a lot in the first home they stay in because they’re not sure what else to do; there is a lot of silence and hard swallows and Ludger is not even in the mood to cook. They do a lot of lying around, Ludger’s head on Julius’s shoulder, draped over his chest (he is much lighter than Julius remembers, but harder, more jaunted). At some point they start kissing, because they don’t know what else to do and it seems as inevitable as Ludger’s murdered friends, as the end of the world. It’s not entirely new to them, and at first it reminds Julius of when it first started – Ludger’s nineteenth birthday, nearly two years ago, when Ludger’s only wish was for Julius not to hurt him. It was nervous and gentle but somehow less foreign than not kissing. Julius would hesitate to call it a relationship – it was moreso a comfort at first, to be able to share their feelings freely, to express them to each other – but still they had wordlessly sealed a sense of loyalty between them.

The kissing was all they ever did back then. The urge to do more came naturally, like a reflex, but one or both of them would stop at times like that. Julius would go for a walk; Ludger would get even quieter for a while. He’d open a window, or play with Rollo. By the time Julius got back, it would be like nothing had happened. That was the kind of separation they’d established. Separating their two relationships had never felt natural; they loved each other because they were brothers and they were brothers because they loved each other. Each bond took what was necessary from the other and worked to bury the rest. The notion of real intimacy, without either of them talking about it, was buried. It was too much, they weren’t that far gone, everything up to that point could be forgotten if necessary. And besides, after a while, Julius wondered what he would do about his glove. He probably wouldn’t be able to leave it on without a few questions.

But, of course, the glove doesn’t matter anymore, and when Julius’s hands start to wander over Ludger’s hips and along the canyons of his back, Ludger won’t let him pull away, and it suddenly seems the most natural thing in the world to feel parts of Ludger he’s never felt before. The gentleness with which he handles Ludger comes easily, despite the impatience he always feels, despite the fact that he’s never so urgently desired another person in the way he desires Ludger. It’s because of that that he is so gentle with him, and though Ludger seems annoyed with it sometimes, he never complains, in the same way that he never complained about Julius hovering over him when he dropped him off for school when he was young. He only complains at first when Julius won’t take off his shirt. To Julius, it feels like he’s done enough damage by simply touching Ludger with his blackened hand – they don’t need visual confirmation of the rest. But Ludger insists. Afterward, when Ludger lies next to him as usual, he traces the border of the blemish with his index finger around Julius’s shoulder, over his clavicle, and up his neck. As it slowly spreads, the journey becomes a longer one, down along Julius’s jawline and further across his chest, receding over his hip bone. Sometimes keeping track of its expansion is their only way of noticing that time has passed. 

Ludger always likes to lay on this side of him – if he didn’t know better, Julius would think it was to torture him on purpose. But Julius understands that Ludger is trying his hardest to hold on to the parts of him that are vanishing from this world, and in those hazy borders where darkness fades into pale light, Ludger sees his own conviction, the reasons why he did what he did. And when Ludger burrows into Julius’s side, nestling his face in the crook of his neck with a small, affectionate sigh, Julius knows it’s his way of loving even the parts of Julius that he kept hidden for so long. It’s his way of forgiveness.

 

Three months have passed when the miasma starts to appear. Both of them always thought the end of the world would come suddenly, with mighty fanfare and divine conflagration – but their end comes slowly, gently, so subtly they barely notice it at first. 

It comes first to the tips of the blades of grass and the roots of the trees. It spreads like a shadow over the sea and swallows up the sand. Little fluttering, grasping patches of darkness clinging to the land. It lingers only on the horizon at first, just a specter in the corners of their eyes, but day by day it creeps closer to their borders, like the darkness spreading over Julius’s body. One day, they leave the windows open while they go for a walk, and when they return, the tomatoes have been given over to rot, and a musky stench wafts through their halls. Ludger can’t stop coughing for days.

They don’t open the windows anymore. They don’t go outside.

They wonder what it’s like in the rest of the world; they wonder what the Land of Canaan looks like, floating above Marksburg, if it’s still there. If Elle is still there. Some way or another, they know, Bisley has failed. Humanity has failed. Somewhere out there, the land is probably littered with the bodies of the people who wouldn’t – or couldn’t – stay indoors. Somewhere out there, everyone is seeing the same sights they are. They see the long fingers of darkness eating the land and none of them understand why. And somehow, those thoughts are so abstract to the Kresnik brothers – that people outside of them should exist. That their choices would be played out for the entire world. 

So life goes on for them. Julius cuts Ludger’s hair. It’s gotten so long and it’s about time to cut the black out of it, isn’t it? Suppose there won’t be enough time to dye it again. Ludger folds the laundry which they can no longer dry outside. He still holds Julius when he cries out in pain in the night – it’s gotten more frequent, and the darkness seems like it’s spreading faster than before, and Ludger’s got the same little touches of darkness biting at his fingertips now, and his toes, like he’s got frostbite, and the first time he sees it Julius can’t stop crying, but it’s alright, Ludger says – it’s alright. It doesn’t hurt, not like Julius’s does. It must be a different kind of thing – like what happened to the tomatoes. But he’ll be fine, they’ll both be fine, and when Julius kisses Ludger’s blackened palms the same way Ludger has always kissed Julius’s, they both almost believe it.

When they lie quietly together, they learn that the miasma has a soft, soft sound. It’s like a breathy hiss, like a long sigh. They can hear it the best when it squeezes through the tight spaces around the windows and under the door, when they are very close to it. It settles on the countertops as a thin film, like the blackest dust, and rises up when they sit on the sofa. Ludger coughs a lot at first, when it first really starts getting in, though he tries to hide it from Julius. They don’t have their piano lessons anymore, due in equal parts to Ludger’s coughing interrupting their playing and the ivory keys becoming nearly indistinguishable from the ebony ones. Sometimes Ludger seems to get better, if only for a while, before he has to spend the entire day in bed because he feels too weak to move. On days like those, Julius feels like Ludger is six years old again, the way he he has to feed him and tuck him into bed, the way that it always seems that time flows in reverse the closer you get to death.

It occurs to Julius, again, that perhaps they were never meant to survive the miasma for this long. It probably has to do with the Kresnik bloodline; it’s probable that everyone else on the planet is already dead. 

Four weeks after the miasma appeared, Ludger’s body is all but wholly black. It doesn’t feel like Julius’s skin – it’s not leathery and hard. Ludger’s feels…dry. When Julius touches it, dark specks fly into the air like dust. And it’s cold. Very cold. And Julius knows that in the end, even though they’re together, they are dying two different deaths. The coughing has stopped; its sole function was probably to act as a harbinger of things to come. Things which have now arrived. Things neither Julius nor Ludger can wholly understand. Things that they chose all the same.

They both awake in the night one night in each other’s arms with locked eyes. Ludger is cold to Julius’s touch – even colder than usual – but Ludger’s touch on his body is somehow warm. It doesn’t make much sense, Julius thinks, but not much does.

“Hey,” Ludger whispers. His voice is low and strained.

Hey.

Julius pictures a black hand wrapping its fingers around Ludger’s vocal cords.

“Do you think, in a different world…we would have gotten married?”

Julius feels a hand of a different kind around his own throat.

…Yes. I’ve seen it, a couple times…in the other dimensions.

“Really?”

Ludger smiles.

He knows that if they fall asleep again, they won’t wake up.

“Was that a weird thing to ask?” whispers Ludger.

No, says Julius. 

You know…if we make it through this, I’ll marry you a thousand times over.

“Sounds good.”

Ludger goes quiet again, but in a few moments Julius feels his lips vellicating against his clavicle. It must be hard to hum when you can barely breathe, Julius thinks. But he joins in anyway, and they’re humming still when sleep overtakes them.


End file.
